Anders

“Don’t talk like an alcoholic.” But it’s like telling a man inflicted with infantile paralysis to run a hundred yards. Without the stuff Tom’s face takes on a strained expression; as the effect of the last fix wears off all grace dies within him. He becomes a dead thing. For him, ordinary consciousness is like a slow desert at the centre of his being; his emptiness is suffocating. He tries to drink, to think of women, to remain interested, but his expression becomes shifty. The one vital coil in him is the bitter knowledge that he can choose to fix again. I have watched him. At the beginning he’s over-confident. He laughs too much. But soon he falls silent and hovers restlessly at the edge of a conversation, as though he were waiting for the void of the drugless present to be miraculously filled. (What would you do all day if you didn’t have to look for a fix?) He is like a child dying of boredom, waiting for promised relief, until his expression becomes sullen. Then, when his face takes on a disdainful expression, I know he has decided to go and look for a fix.”
― Alexander Trocchi, Cain's Book

“On the collective level, the race manifests itself in ceaseless upheavals. Whereas social and political systems previously endured for centuries, today every generation destroys the old world and builds a new one in its place. As the Communist Manifesto brilliantly put it, the modern world positively requires uncertainty and disturbance. All fixed relations and ancient prejudices are swept away, and new structures become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. It isn’t easy to live in such a chaotic world, and it is even harder to govern it. Hence modernity needs to work hard to ensure that neither human individuals nor the human collective will try to retire from the race, despite all the tension and chaos it creates.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

“Hours of insanity and escape . . . in which I write inadequate verse, read, rage . . . record anecdotes which fade into the page like stains . . . beat time with my pencil’s business end . . . nip at the loose skin on the side of my hand with my teeth . . . cast schemes and tropes like horoscopes . . . practice catachresis as though it were croquet . . . grrrowl . . . kick wastebaskets into corners . . . realize that when I picture my methods of construction all the images are architectural, but when I dream of the ultimate fiction—that animal entity, the made-up syllabic self—I am trying to energize old, used-up, stolen organs like Dr. Frankenstein . . . grrrind . . . throw wet wads of Kleenex from a spring or winter cold into the corner where they mainly miss the basket . . . O . . . Ohio: I hear howling from both Os . . . play ring agroan the rosie . . . pace . . . put an angry erection back in my pants . . . rhyme . . . Then occasionally perceive beneath me on the page a few lines which . . . while I was elsewhere must have . . . yes, a few lines which have . . . which have the sound . . . the true whistle of the spirit. Wait’ll they read that, I say, perhaps even aloud, over the water running in the kitchen sink, over the noise of my writing lamp, coffee growing cold in the cup, the grrowl of my belly. Yet when I raise my right palm from the paper where, in oath, I’ve put it, the whistle in those words is gone, and only the lamp sings. Till I pull its chain like a john.”
― William H. Gass, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories

“How do you know if an entity is real? Very simple – just ask yourself, ‘Can it suffer?’ When people burn down the temple of Zeus, Zeus doesn’t suffer. When the euro loses its value, the euro doesn’t suffer. When a bank goes bankrupt, the bank doesn’t suffer. When a country suffers a defeat in war, the country doesn’t really suffer. It’s just a metaphor. In contrast, when a soldier is wounded in battle, he really does suffer. When a famished peasant has nothing to eat, she suffers. When a cow is separated from her newborn calf, she suffers. This is reality.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow